Hello Managers,
We are about to migrate our servers to an NIS environment in order to
better utilize NFS. To prepare for this, I am reassigning our users'
UIDs so they are same across all our servers, because currently our
users have different UIDs on different servers. Obviously, this is to
prevent user's files from being owned by someone else depending on which
server it is read from.
So what I did is copy the passwd file from all the machines and edited
the UIDs so they would match. We have a small number of users so this
was easy to do. Then I copied it back to a test server (after backing
up the original one, of course). After doing this, I expected all the
owners of files and directories on my filesystem to change to numerical
values, because everyone has a completly different UID. But to my
surprise, nothing changed. All the files owners were the original
owners. I confirmed this by using 'id' and it reported back the
original UIDs. Even when I restarted the machine, the UID's never
changed.
This was completly unexpected. Some symptoms I came accross was using
'vipw', it would bring up the new passwd file. If I log in as a user
and change my password with 'passwd' it will change the password field
of the new passwd file, however it will also revert the UID to the
original UID.
Are the UID's somehow cached somewhere else? Maybe I'm approaching this
in a dumb manner and there is a better, more intelligent method to
migrating to NIS that someone could share with me?
I am setting this up for 4 servers plus 1 test machine. They are all
running 4.0F. One point that may or may not have affected this was the
test machine used to employ C2 security, and I turned it off to modify
the passwd file.
Thanks in advance,
Kevin
--
Kevin Dea
System Administrator
Alpine Electronics Research of America
Received on Tue Oct 03 2000 - 01:40:11 NZDT